there was no appeal; any one who created such a magistrate should be protected by no law sacred or profane and might be slain with impunity."[1] The law was evidently called out by the unlimited power of the decemvirate which had just been abolished; it did more than merely affirm the first lex Valeria,[2] for it rendered the creation of an absolute judicial power by the rogatio of a magistrate a capital offence, even when this proposal had been accepted by the people. But the scope of the appeal was not extended; the "creation" of a magistrate referred to election sanctioned by the people, and did not, therefore, affect the right of the consul to nominate a dictator from whom there was no appeal; nor did it extend the limits of the appeal beyond the original boundaries—the pomerium or, at the utmost, the first milestone from the city.[3]
Two other laws aimed at giving a legal existence to the plebeian community. One gave a legal sanction to the sacrosanctitas of the plebeian magistrates by enacting that any one who injured them should be sacer to the whole community.[4] Another gave a more binding character to the formal resolutions passed at the concilium of the Plebs. Its import is obscure, but there can be no doubt that it marks an important stage in the validity of plebiscita. We are told that it was meant to settle the controverted question whether resolutions of the Plebs were binding on Patricians;[5] and that it did this by enacting that "whatsoever the Plebs commanded by its tribes should bind the people (ut, quod tributim plebes jussisset, populum teneret)." It is possible that our authority has misunderstood the purport of this law, but hardly likely that the misconception is so great as that imagined by some modern theorists. It is certain that there is no implication that plebiscita had from this time the force of leges; it was agreed that the resolutions of the Plebs did not gain the force of Acts of Parliament until more than 160 years later. Recent attempts to interpret the Valerio-Horatian law have been based on the supposition that it was concerned with some mode in which a plebiscitum might become a lex, that it facilitated the transformation of a resolution of the Plebs into a binding law of
- ↑ Liv. iii. 55 "ne quis ullum magistratum sine provocatione crearet, qui creasset, eum jus fasque esset occidi: neve ea caedes capitalis noxae haberetur."
- ↑ p. 79.
- ↑ p. 79.
- ↑ p. 99.
- ↑ Liv. iii. 55 "omnium primum, cum velut in controverso jure esset, tenerenturne patres plebiscitis, legem centuriatis comitiis tulere 'ut quod,'" etc. Cf. Dionys. xi. 45.
